Chapter 4 MAYA
MAYA
A week in and I'm still here.
That has got to count for something.
The cabin is still cold in the mornings and the internet drops when the wind comes from the north and the indoor wood pile needs restocking every day, which I did not account for. But the routines are holding. Routines are good. They keep my mind from wondering.
March arrived with blue skies so sharp they hurt to look at.
The work is going well enough.
I have three open commissions on the tablet.
Two for a small publisher in Portland who found me through my pseudonym and communicates entirely by email, which suits me.
One for an independent author who writes picture books about animals that explain hard things to children.
Loss. Change. The particular fear of what comes next.
I used to do this work in person, in a classroom with seventeen kindergarteners and paint-stained fingers and songs I made up on the spot.
Now I do it alone, on a screen, under a name that isn't mine.
The work is quieter. It pays less. But, I am better at it than I expected.
And the children still get the stories, even if they'll never know who drew them.
The colors on screen today are deep blue-greens of a forest at dusk. A fox kit at the mouth of its den, looking out at a world it hasn't entered yet. One paw forward. Not committed.
Going to town the first time took two days of talking myself into it. Beanie pulled low, scarf covering most of my face, which in Montana in early March reads as sensible rather than suspicious. Hardware store for the tarp and rope. General store for supplies.
Nobody looked at me twice. I walked the three blocks of Briarhaven's main street and nothing happened. No second glances, no recognition, no phones angled in my direction. Just a small town going about its Tuesday.
I came back to the cabin and sat in the kitchen and something in my chest loosened half a turn, like a bolt that's been overtightened for months.
Not hope. I'm not ready for that word. Just the absence of the specific dread that has followed me since Los Angeles, and the absence of dread, it turns out, feels like an entire season changing.
And then I remember the parcel that was on the doorstep four mornings ago.
I stood in the doorway longer than I should have before I touched it, the cold coming through my socks, the morning light flat and unhelpful on the brown paper surface.
Nothing about it told me anything. That's what made it worse.
I've learned to read threat from very small signals, and a package with no markings on a doorstep in a place nobody is supposed to know I exist is not a small signal.
I stood there until the cold became the more pressing problem, and then I picked it up.
Inside: a base layer set, mid-layer fleece, waterproof shell pants, a coat that weighed more than anything I'd worn before. Sturdy boots.
My size, exactly, which meant someone had looked at me more carefully than I'd registered being looked at. I stood with that information for a moment before the rest of it assembled itself.
And a note.
Your gear is an insult.
I read it twice.
The handwriting I didn't recognize, but the register was unmistakable. That specific brand of blunt and smugness.
Jace.
Something warm tried to surface. I let it get halfway.
The smile lasted four seconds. Four seconds longer than I planned for, and I was alone in the kitchen, which is the only reason I'm not more annoyed about it.
The boots grip where my old ones slipped. The coat keeps me warm in a way the previous one didn’t. Jace was not wrong about the quality. I wear both every day because frostbite doesn't care about my principles.
What I haven't done is say thank you. Saying thank you is contact. Contact is a thread between me and another person, and threads can be followed, and I have recent and thorough evidence of what happens when someone follows a thread back to where I am.
The work is done for today, so I close my laptop. My back has opinions about the kitchen chair I've been using as a desk chair for six hours. I stand, roll my shoulders, look at the window.
Light still good. Forty minutes before it drops below the tree line and takes the temperature with it.
The water stain above the kitchen has expanded two centimeters since I arrived.
I found the problem section from the ground the first week: flashing pulled away from the ridge, the gap visible from below.
Rain or snowmelt comes through, tracks across the ceiling, pools above the kitchen.
It will get worse. The tarp has been sitting rolled under the table since I bought it.
The rope coiled beside it. I've been looking at both for days, working out the approach.
It will be simple enough as long as I can get up there.
What I don't have is a ladder.
What I have is a wood pile stacked against the back wall, chest height, its top surface close enough to the eave that I could use it as a platform.
I could knock on their door. Reid made the offer plainly. Twenty minutes up the mountain. Three men with tools and height and the kind of competence that makes a job like this take twenty minutes instead of two hours.
I pull on the coat. The boots. Pick up the tarp and the rope.
The thing about accepting help is that it comes with a ledger. Maybe not the first time. Maybe not the second. But eventually someone looks at the column of things they've done for you and decides the balance has shifted, and then they tell you what you owe.
I can fix my own roof.
The back of the cabin is already in shadow, the cold here more immediate than in the open, the kind that settles into joints and seams and stays. The wood pile catches the last of the western light across its top layer. I study the route. Stack to eave to roof.
The first attempt rolls my left ankle on a shifting log.
I grab the cabin wall and hold still until the sting passes, cheek pressed against cold wood siding, breathing through it.
Not broken. Fine. The second attempt is more deliberate.
I find the stable logs, test before I commit, get my knee onto the top layer and then my other foot.
The eave is within reach. Both hands on the roof edge, the granular bite of snow-dusted shingles through my gloves, and I pull.
By the time I'm on my knees on the shingles the light has already shifted and my fingers are registering temperature through the gloves in a way that means the time window is closing. The wind comes across the roof in gusts, irregular, which I did not account for on the ground.
The view stops me for two seconds. The valley through the tree line, the mountains beyond it, the sky holding that unreasonable blue against the white.
Cerulean bleeding into cobalt at the edges, the snow catching the last light in a wash of warm gold that I'd mix with titanium white and a breath of cadmium yellow.
The kind of thing I'd have painted once.
Two seconds. Then I find the problem section and work.
The tarp fights me. Every time I get it positioned the wind finds an edge and lifts it.
My fingers go from cold to numb on the third attempt, the feeling dropping out of my fingertips so gradually I don't notice until I'm working a grommet by sensation alone, the metal edge barely registering.
I work by feel where I can't work by sight, the tarp snapping against my forearms hard enough to sting, until the rope goes through and I have something to anchor.
Loop it, pull it taut, work to the roof edge, tie off to the post below.
The knot is ugly. It is also not coming undone.
I sit back on the shingles and look at what I've done. Problem identified, addressed, resolved. The satisfaction is specific and clean and entirely mine.
I turn around and lower myself toward the wood pile.
My right boot finds the top log.
The log shifts.
My left boot goes with it. No recovery. No moment between stable and not. The roof edge is there and then it isn't. Sky where the cabin wall was. The wood pile not where my feet expected it.
Impact.
My hip takes it first and then my shoulder and then the back of my skull against something that isn't snow.
A log comes down from above. The edge of it catches my head above the left ear with a sound I hear inside my skull.
Snow in my mouth, cold and granular, the taste of iron underneath it. I try to put my hand to my head and my arm doesn't respond on the first attempt. The second attempt finds wetness. Warm, in all this cold.
I need to get up.
The thought is clear. My body does not follow it. The ground is very cold against my back and the sky above me is losing its color, the blue draining toward grey, or maybe that's my vision, I can't tell the difference.
The cold is seeping through the coat. Through the base layer.
Into the skin along my spine. I can feel it making progress, systematic, patient, and I think, distantly, that this is how people die in places like this.
Not dramatically. Just a slow surrender of heat while the sky gets dark and there is nobody close enough to know.
My eyes close.
I tell them to open.
They don't.